


Synonymous With Sacrifice

by alexclusive



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe, Complicated Relationships, Fate & Destiny, Loyalty, M/M, Screw Destiny, Spinoff, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, non-monster Ardyn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-06
Updated: 2018-11-06
Packaged: 2019-08-19 14:56:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16536782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexclusive/pseuds/alexclusive
Summary: “Tell me, Your Grace — why do you let yourself be forced to use your healing powers? It would be better for you if you did not, given the toll they take.”—The Temptation Of Saint Anthony, But With This Guy, Chapter 28.Healing Day comes once a month, and the ill and afflicted line up in droves to receive the blessings of the younger prince of Lucis. There's really just one problem with it, in Cor's opinion — and that problem is the younger prince of Lucis.





	Synonymous With Sacrifice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HigharollaKockamamie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HigharollaKockamamie/gifts).



> As a note, this fic is set in what I've been lovingly referring to as _the Laverne and Shirleyverse_ , in that it takes place in approximately the same universe as _The Temptation of Saint Anthony, but with This Guy_ , but with no actual promises that anything herein is strict canon to that universe. The _Laverne and Shirley_ to Saint Anthony's _Happy Days_ , if you will. 
> 
> Immense thanks as always to [HigharollaKockamamie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/HigharollaKockamamie/pseuds/HigharollaKockamamie) for letting me play with the phenomenal sandbox she's created. This work in particular was inspired by the concept of Ardyn's Healing Day in [Chapter Six](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11887434/chapters/27015822) of _Saint Anthony_ ; this one, however, occurs when Ardyn is considerably younger, and consequently isn't quite so responsible about the choices he makes.

By the time Regis found him, he'd already ripped through three training dummies in the Crownsguard gym and was steadily working his way through the fourth.

"Those cost money, you know," the crown prince said dryly as he leaned against the doorjamb, arms folded across his chest and thick black hair falling in debonair waves around his face. "Not that I'm begrudging you the training any, but really, Cor, you do this every time."

"I don't do it _every_ time," he protested, blandly enough that it wasn't really a protest, and led his sword arm fall to his side. The steel made a soft clanking noise where it impacted against the floor, and it was like flipping a switch: all of a sudden it seemed like the exhaustion was finally permitted to catch up with him, flooding through his muscles and igniting a rough burn in his nerves. His forehead was beaded with sweat, making his short-cropped hair stick up in odd directions; it made him wonder, vaguely, where his beret had gotten off to, and when he ultimately did remember where it had gone, the burn in his muscles abruptly shifted to an acid upset in the pit of his stomach.

"Every time, without fail," Regis answered, shaking his head as though he was unwilling to brook any protests to the contrary. "You think I haven't been keeping track?"

Cor shrugged, bending over a little at the waist and resting his free hand on his knees to help support himself while he caught his breath. It kind of made it feel like he was bowing to the dummy he'd been eviscerating a few moments before, which was a funny thought. The stuffing was starting to stick out from a dozen punctures and apparently at some point in his whirlwind he'd managed to hack half the head clean off.

"Would've figured you had better things to do," he replied at last, almost like an afterthought.

Regis sighed, shaking his head as if in exasperation. Moments like these were the times when you could really tell that he and Ardy were related. Regis was never nearly so theatrical as his younger brother liked to be, but that didn't mean he didn't still sometimes look like he'd stepped right out of a movie set in his own right. 

"I'll be a piss-poor king if I can't even figure out how to do something as simple as gauging my best Crownsguard's mood, Cor." Regis paused. "Besides, you're an open book."

"Yeah?"

"Or a newspaper headline. Anytime you go through more than two dummies in a single session, you're not really training. You're pissed about something you can't kill, so you're taking it out on something you can."

"I'm not pissed," he insisted, which was a lie. Regis knew it, too, from the way he cocked an eyebrow at him. Just one, which was harder than you'd think to do, except that Regis had it down to a gods-damned _art_.

"Really," the future king said imperturbably. "So the fact that you're down here obliterating training dummies on Healing Day for the third time in as many months is...coincidence, then?"

For a second, Cor thought about protesting that retort, but then ultimately decided against it. No point, when Regis was dead-on. He really had a knack for doing that, didn't he.

Instead, he let his arm drop further, this time letting his shoulders slump outright. "I just hate it," he admitted at last, pulling himself back upright and shucking his free hand through his damp, sweaty hair. "What it does to him."

"It's not permanent. You know that," Regis replied softly, but where his mouth said one thing, his expression said another. It bothered him, too. You could tell just from looking.

(With Regis, you could tell it bothered him like watching a hurricane rolling in from over the horizon. You saw the dark clouds coming in advance, watched the high winds rip apart other people's homes and lives way off in the distance. You stood there in the tranquility and hoped that you were ready for what was coming, because sooner or later it'd be coming for you, and whenever it got there it was going to rip you apart too, but for the time being you were completely untouched. Unharmed. And waiting.)

"It's not about that," he replied, resisting the urge to grit his teeth at the thought of what had been going on — what was probably _still_ going on — upstairs in the pavilion in the gardens. "He pushes himself too much."

"I hope that's your professional opinion, as the resident person who pushes himself too much around here."

"He'll kill himself doing it, someday," Cor pointed out.

Regis sighed. "I know. But you know what he'll say, if you try in the slightest to knock any sort of sense into him —"

" _The Lucis Caelum name is synonymous with sacrifice_ ," Cor replied instantly, with the perfect cadence and inflection that could only come of hearing the same phrase repeated several dozen times in the exact same way. "Not much point of having a Crownsguard in the first place, if you royals are so hellbent on getting yourselves killed all on your own."

"Maybe that's exactly why we have you," Regis answered with a hint of a grin curling at the edge of his mouth. "To save us from ourselves."

Unbidden, a flush rose up traitorously beneath his ruddy cheeks, too fast and too hot for him to attribute to residual effects of the workout he'd been throwing himself into a few minutes prior. In a last-ditch attempt at keeping it under wraps, he turned swiftly on his heel and stalked over to the mangled dummy he'd been murdering, walking around back and starting the arduous process of unfastening it from its post so that it could be replaced with a fresh one.

Naturally, Regis wasn't fooled for an instant. "Leave that," he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "I was coming to tell you that he's almost done. And that his queue was particularly long today, so go make sure he makes it back to his rooms without collapsing, will you?"

Cor ducked his head, still trying to will down the heat in his face without much success. "There stuff in the kitchens for him?" he said gruffly, trying to cover it up.

"I'm certain," Regis replied, still making those little shooing motions with his hand. " _Go_. Carry him back if you have to. But I want you looking after him."

_Is that for his sake or for mine,_ Cor thought to himself as he finally emerged from behind the mutilated dummy and started stalking toward the door at a rapid clip, forcing his legs to stay at a brisk but steady walk at least until he was sufficiently out of earshot to break into a hard run.

It was a lucky thing, too, that he wasn't just a few paces slower, or he would've still been within close enough earshot of the training room to overhear Regis sighing and clicking his tongue and reminding himself aloud to put in a requisition order for another half-dozen training dummies as soon as possible.

~*~

Ardy still had a line out the door of his tent in the gardens by the time he arrived, but at least it was a short one, and would probably go fast. None of the people looked all that bad; sometimes they came with visibly broken bones or open wounds, and cases like those just made a guy a little sick to his stomach, to think that they were stuck waiting in a line for Ardy's healing hands while in excruciating pain like that. At least the ones lined up today only seemed a little queasy at the worst and perfectly fine at the best. Sometimes people did that, came to Healing Day when they were perfectly healthy, and still waited the whole while for their turn just to have Ardy take their hand and smile at them. Sometimes people acted like it was some kind of magic spell, getting his blessing like that.

(It sure felt like one, though, when he healed you. Cor had plenty of firsthand experience with that. One second you'd feel like the hurt was a fire inside you, pushing its way out through your body toward the open air, and the next second it'd feel like a cool rush of water was flowing over everything, diluting the poison that the pain tattooed beneath your skin. It made it easier to deal with pain in general, knowing that it was always only temporary when Ardy was nearby. It put a time limit on the burn, made it a finite thing. Sooner or later he'd find you, and it'd be all right again.)

He knew for a fact that he wasn't supposed to just walk right in without asking. There wasn't really supposed to be an audience hanging around listening in on the people seeking out the healing, which was the reason for the tent and the single-file line. It was supposed to encourage people to be honest with Ardy about the things that ailed them. Still, Cor could get away with a lot, being Crownsguard. Privacy or not, nobody could really protest the right of a Crownsguard to be there in the prince's proximity, regardless of what he was doing at the time.

So he pushed his way in through the flap, brandishing the covered tray of whatever he'd picked up from the kitchens on his way back out to the gardens, and quietly stalked over to leave it on an empty corner of the table. His entrance drew attention, because of course it did, but all Ardy did was shoot him a tenderly exasperated look before going back to holding his current supplicant's hand between both of his own.

That was fine, really. Cor could just hang around adjacent to the food, looming like some kind of bizarre butler-gargyole, until Ardy was done. It gave him a chance to get a proper look at the younger prince of Lucis — a _real_ look at him, the kind that only someone who really knew him could do.

For someone who knew how to look for them, all the tells were there. People who didn't see the prince every day wouldn't pick up on the fact that his skin was whiter than usual, or that the areas around his eyes were starting to look a little dark and sunken. No, all they'd notice were the things that stood out about him, like the brilliant gold of his cat's eyes or the slight wave of his red-purple hair, or the soft lilt of his voice as he flattered and chatted with them straight through the process. They wouldn't notice the careful effort he was putting in to keep himself upright in his chair, or how his flamboyant sentences were clipped just a little bit shorter than usual, like he was trying to conserve the air he was using to spout them.

Cor noticed, of course. It was his job, to notice things like that.

Still, there wasn't much he could do about it until Healing Day was officially over, so it wound up a lucky thing that the last few went quick. People came in, explained their illnesses, and Ardy smiled that beatific smile of his and extended his hands. Magic flashed, people received their benedictions, and then they babbled their thanks and were gone. 

Just like every month. Just like every Healing Day.

It couldn't be over soon enough, in Cor's opinion, but at last, finally, they were alone.

"Come to fetch me, have you?" said Ardy by way of greeting, sitting back in his chair and looking up at him with a list to his head and a sigh on his lips. "I'm glad. It's been another good day's work."

"You look like shit," he answered, reaching for the thing of food and nudging it in Ardy's direction. "Hurry up and eat."

Ardy opened his mouth to say something, and Cor added quickly, "I'm not going to feed you."

"Damn," Ardy said, instead of whatever it was he'd been about to say, and made a show of limply reaching for the lid of the covered platter, like it took a titanic effort just to get his arm up that high. He was faking it, probably. Hopefully. "There go my notions of savoring bunches of grapes lowered down to mouth level by your strong, capable hand."

"You expecting me to fan you with palm fronds while I'm at it?"

"I'd hardly decline, if you were offering," Ardy murmured, staring almost wistfully at the food laid out for him once he finally managed to heave the cover off. That was unusual and different; most Healing Days, he would've already been halfway to inhaling the whole mess of it by now, but today it was almost like he either couldn't muster up the interest or the willpower to get even a bite of it into his mouth. "However, I'm fully aware that you're not offering."

Again, Cor found himself feeling that odd acid burn down deep in his gut. This wasn't how this was supposed to go. Had it just been an unusually hard day on Ardy? This wasn't normal. Had he pushed himself too far? His eyes seemed brighter than usual somehow, too sharp and too golden. Maybe that was just the way they were contrasting with his face. Maybe it was something else.

"Why do you do this to yourself?" he caught himself whispering without thinking, not realizing that the words had escaped him until it was too late to catch them and drag them back into his mouth.

Instantly, he steeled himself for what he knew would be Ardy's chiding reply. Here it came, the same as always: _the Lucis Caelum name is synonymous with sacrifice_. For the good of the people, for the ailing and the afflicted, for the citizens of the crown who reach out their hands and cry for relief from their burdens, blah blah blah —

Except then Ardy spoke, and it wasn't what he was expecting at all.

"The gods make their demands of the Lucian kings," Ardy answered softly, shaping each word carefully with that lax, lip-bitten mouth of his. "And the burdens of the _sang royal_ fall disproportionately upon the heir to the crown. I've never been of the opinion that Regis should be the only one to bear that burden."

King Mors's hair had been gray for years. The wrinkles on his hands were pronounced, deep-set in the parchment-gray skin around the black ring he perpetually bore on his middle finger.

"He'd be pissed as hell if he knew you were doing this just to be even with him," Cor remarked at last, after swallowing once to get the sandpapery feeling off his tongue and out of his throat where they'd gone dry from listening. "Bad enough he's got to suffer the damn thing someday. You know he wouldn't want you trying to match him."

"Alas, _that_ is the one burden he must bear alone, as the elder sibling: a younger brother who patently refuses to do as he's told."

"Or what's good for him," Cor retorted.

That got a smile out of Ardy, one that was so faint it almost wasn't there at all, unless you knew where to look for it curling up right at the very edge of one corner of his mouth.

"The self-sacrificing is bad enough. The fact that you're doing it out of spite is even worse," Cor continued flatly.

Ardy's eyes gleamed. "Speaking as the resident expert on spiteful self-sacrifice, are we?"

"I hate how you and Regis both do that."

"I know," said Ardy pleasantly.

Cor sighed, scrubbing a hand over his face, as he abruptly got tired of watching Ardy apparently not have the limb strength to lift a fork to his mouth, and went over to do precisely what he'd said he wouldn't. It was undignified, and beneath him, and all manner of other stupid things. But it was also Ardy, and somehow that always made for a valid exception.

"Eat," he said, more softly this time, and groped around on the tray in search of a spoon, but Ardy cut him off with a slight shake of his head. His eyes were turning soft around his amber irises; it made his eyelashes look longer and darker, somehow.

"Did Regis tell you to come save me from myself?" Ardy murmured, tilting his chin in just such a way that it made his hair cascade around his face, red like a sunset against the pale of his skin. "I wonder where he found you skulking about this time. Ah — wait, I've got it. You were downstairs in the training room again, weren't you..."

"No," Cor answered immediately, and held out for a good fifteen seconds before amending it to, "Shut up."

"Another day, another requisition form," Ardy sighed dramatically. "Your violence is a masterwork of the martial form, my dear Leonis."

"I don't know what that means and I don't actually believe you do either," Cor replied. "How about you quit talking and start eating?"

"Alas, your frustrations are a bit misplaced," Ardy went on, ignoring him as though he hadn't spoken at all. An almost sleepy smile curled across his lips, eyes dropping half-lidded with a catlike look of satisfaction. "Why hold those innocent dummies accountable for sins that are so clearly and unmistakably mine? It's hardly fair to vent such rage on a scapegoat, you know. You ought to simply take it out on me directly sometime, instead of on your training equipment."

Cor went deathly still, frozen in place and cold all over with the recognition of where this conversation was headed. "I'm pretty sure beating the shit out of the prince is the exact opposite of what the Crownsguard is supposed to be doing."

"Shall I make it a decree?" Ardy murmured, almost like a purr, except more exhausted. "You'd be duty-bound to obey it, then."

"Don't order me to beat the shit out of you. What the hell."

"Just one slap, then. Oh, _please_."

"Stop it."

"Pull my hair."

"Stop."

"Put your hand on my throat —"

" _Stop_."

"— and ever so slowly, start to _squeeze_..."

Just like that, something snapped.

"Gods _damn_ it, Ardy," Cor growled, abandoning everything else he was doing in favor of grasping his prince by the lapels of his incredibly stupid coat, hauling him up and out of his chair and looking at him for just one scorching moment before crushing their mouths together.

It did the trick. He felt the whine that escaped from the back of Ardy's throat more than he heard it, felt the flutter of his eyelashes as they closed and his prince went still in his hold. It was hot, and slick, and he didn't really know what he was doing, but a second or two later he felt fingers crawling up the folds of his own jacket, looking for purchase and twisting in when they found it, like Ardy needed something to hold on to and was searching desperately for it. He felt him sigh, too, when the search solidified with his hands clinging to the loose fabric of his fatigues, clinging like a man at risk of being swept away by an ocean current if he dared to let go of the life raft beneath his hands.

" _Damn_ it, Ardy," he cursed again, this time pressed against his mouth, and Ardy made a strangled approving noise and nodded as best he could without breaking the kiss, and scrabbled to hold on tighter. His fingertips were dancing, phantom whispers tangible against his skin, a silent _yes, yes, yes_ that his hands tried to say because his lips had no way to at the moment.

But this was Ardy, and there was no way he'd stay silent forever; at the first break for air, a low and thick, "Oh, _yes_ ," escaped his kiss-bruised lips, still slightly hanging open as if inviting him back for another go. "Yes, I am _damned_. Me and every other poor unfortunate soul to bear the weight of our name..."

Halfway annoyed, and not really thinking about it, Cor leaned back in and bit him, sinking his teeth into Ardy's lower lip. This time, Ardy's whine pitched up high into a full-blown keen, and belatedly Cor rushed to smother it, lest some other Crownsguard come investigating to see why it sounded like their prince was dying out here.

"The gods in their infinite generosity give such gifts to the kings of Lucis," Ardy sighed, each word sounding husky as he pressed them one by one against Cor's mouth as if for safekeeping. "For a price, always a price. Sucking us dry and casting away the husk..."

"Stop doing this to yourself," he hissed, before he could think better of it, and let go of one of Ardy's lapels in favor of twisting his fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck instead.

"Why shouldn't I beat them to it?" Ardy murmured, as his chin raised and his head dropped back to bare a slightly wider strip of skin above the scarf looped around his throat. His hair looked like a living thing, woven between Cor's fingers. "It's all the same in the end anyway. One king of Lucis, handsome and young and nobly dead. Why not the spare son as well, albeit more ignobly so?"

"I won't let you die," Cor snapped, as one quick tug of his hand had Ardy's throat bared even further, and it definitely wasn't an invitation but somehow that didn't stop Cor from ducking close and growling his words somewhere against the underside of Ardy's jaw, anyway. "I don't care whose way I have to get in to do it — some assassin's, the gods', or just yours, yourself."

"Then swear it," Ardy whispered, and Cor was too preoccupied to get a look at the expression on his face, but the tone in his voice said it all, that his prince was rapidly going blissed-out and beatific. "Swear they can't have Regis. Swear they can't have me."

The words were like ice in his veins — a chill that abruptly melted into a deluge from the fire that shot through him fast on its heels.

"If they want you, they can come _take_ you," he all but snarled, knowing full well that what he was saying was blasphemy at best and an invitation for Bahamut to come down and personally kick his ass at worst, but somehow none of that really seemed to matter right now. Ardy's hands found their way to his shoulders, and he seemed to shiver all over in his delight.

This was crazy, and his head was starting to spin, but somehow it all felt _right_ and he found he didn't want to stop. 

"They'll have to get through me first," Cor finished through a ragged growl, as he pressed his mouth to Ardy's pulse and bit down.

~*~

Of all the things he'd thought he would end up doing today, marking up the neck of the younger prince of Lucis wasn't anywhere close to being on the list of them, but that was exactly what happened. And somehow, it seemed to do the trick; whatever it was that Ardy had been keeping bottled up, and whatever sideways masochism he'd been aching to indulge with his little Healing Day stunt, it seemed to find an outlet in squirming and gasping beneath Cor's hands and teeth, until at last Ardy wasn't so much sulky and self-destructive as just plain exhausted.

That was okay. They could work with exhausted.

With some coaxing, Ardy did actually devour the full contents of his proffered tray. That should've given him more than enough of a boost to get off his ass and hustle out of the healer's tent on his own, but somehow or another Cor still wound up piggybacking him up to his room in the Citadel anyway. It was a longish hike, made longer with the weight of another person on his back, and it sure didn't help that Ardy spent the whole trip making a big deal out of being wounded and battle-scarred and how he'd clearly need to wear scarves about his poor kiss-bitten throat for veritable _weeks_ , as though he really needed an excuse for wearing scarves when he'd probably been planning to accessorize with the damn things for weeks already anyway.

Still, Ardy making a pest of himself was solid proof that he was perking up, and though the toll of the hundredsome healings he'd performed that afternoon was still visible in his face, he looked better than he'd been. Nothing that a long nap and a few orders of room service wouldn't fix.

To his credit, once they reached Ardy's suite of rooms, Cor made it a point of setting him gently down on his mattress atop the comforter, rather than unceremoniously dropping him onto it like he usually would. He could still taste the tang of skin-salt and sweat on his tongue, and Ardy's eyes were glittering like a cat's.

"I don't suppose I could tempt you to stay," Ardy all but purred, reaching up to catch hold of Cor's sleeve before he could get out of arm's reach, instinctively arranging himself on the mattress in such a way that it left no ambiguity about what he was really gunning for. He had his head tilted just right to show off the reddening bruise over his pulse point; it'd be fully blue-purple by the morning. "It's just that I can feel my proclivities sliding back toward the quagmire of darkness already, and who but you could possibly redeem me from it?"

"You're such a pain in the ass," Cor replied, shaking his head in exasperation.

"A handsome pain in the ass."

"Which is still a pain in the ass."

Ardy closed his eyes, letting his face take on that sort of soft, beatific expression again. "Very well. I suppose I shall endure somehow, from clinging merely to my memories of you."

"You're not usually this flowery," Cor remarked, squinting at him a little. "I didn't break you, did I?"

Ardy _hmmm_ ed, still with his eyes closed, and held a little tighter to his sleeve. "Perhaps I was already broken," he murmured pleasantly. "You're the only one I'd trust to put me back together again."

And _that_ , as it turned out, was precisely the catalyst needed to get Cor to gravitate toward him, setting one knee against the mattress as he moved up and over Ardy, leaning all the way over him so that their faces were aligned, one hovering up above the other.

"You're a lot of things, your Grace," he said without preamble, and reached down to cup his sword-calloused hand against the soft stubbly curve of Ardy's cheek. "But broken isn't one of them, and never will be."

"How sweet you are to me," Ardy breathed, leaning immediately into the feel of his hand. Then, after a moment, something seemed to occur to him, and he added almost belatedly, "Ah. I'm back to _your Grace_ again, am I?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Cor said without any real insistence behind it, and felt a little thrill kick in the pit of his stomach as Ardy smiled in response. "That's all I ever call you."

"Mmm. You know, I can think of plenty of things I'd _like_ you to —"

" _Sleep tight, your Grace_ ," Cor interrupted instantly, and resisted the urge to smother Ardy with one of his stupid tasseled pillows as his prince started to snicker.

"Yes, yes," Ardy conceded at last, indulging himself in a yawn before finally letting his head fall to the side in preparation to slip away into slumber. "Good night, sleep tight, don't let the Astrals bite."

"Hn," Cor replied as he untangled himself from Ardy's half-asleep form and permitted himself one last fond stroke of his prince's cheek with the tips of his fingers before finally, regretfully pulling away. Halfway underneath one of the folds of Ardy's comforter was tucked his missing beret, he noted as he withdrew. Right where he'd expected it might turn up, after Ardy had snatched it and absconded with it a few days back.

He crossed the room on silent footsteps, keeping them light and avoiding all the nightingale floorboards they'd installed one lazy summer's afternoon on a whim, and when he reached the door he paused and turned back to look at his prince one last time, barely even visible amidst the stupid elaborate canopy and draperies of his even stupider bed.

"You're not theirs to bite," he murmured almost absently as he crossed the threshold into the hall, like some kind of benediction of his own. "You're already mine."

And as the door fell shut behind him, he could hear Ardy's answer come drifting softly back: "Every time."

**Author's Note:**

> Once again, massive thanks to [HigharollaKockamamie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/HigharollaKockamamie/pseuds/HigharollaKockamamie) for letting me dabble around in this AU of an AU to my heart's content.
> 
> Any and all feedback is appreciated, and thank you very much for reading!


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